Human capital management (“HCM”) applications allow you to set up employer benefit plans such as health insurance, dental insurance, pension plans, etc. They also allow you to set up eligibility and enrollment requirements for these plans, to control who should receive benefits, and the period for which they can receive benefits. Plan design is an administrative task performed by the benefits specialist. The benefits specialist decides on the plans to be offered, options within these plans, the eligibility and enrollment requirements of these plans, and the costs to be borne by the user and the employer. Similar tasks are performed for a number of plans resulting in the creation and interlinking of several plan objects. These plans are pulled together under a program for convenience of managing these objects. This hierarchy of objects is collectively called compensation object hierarchy.
Today, however, companies are facing more complex conditions that require better (more granular) control and flexibility. This is especially required for those businesses that need to comply with statutory calculations, and handle benefits across assignments. This results in more complex plan design and more objects. In the existing approach, each object or a small group of objects are built by using different screens. Then, these objects are interlinked using a separate screen. With the present approach, the user needs to understand the order in which the objects need to be created and then linked together to build the complete hierarchy. Benefits specialists have to be able to understand and manage these complex set of objects.